Paper Pieces
by ungallant deficient
Summary: Her words broke through the silence in the room like shattered glass. Harry froze, hands clenching tight on the handle of his suitcase. Rating for allusion to subtle sexuality. UPDATED
1. Suitcases

"Were you even going to tell me?"  
  
Her words broke through the silence in the room like shattered glass. Harry froze, hangs clenching tight on the handle of his suitcase.   
  
He didn't have to turn around to know what Hermione would look like. Stark white in contrast to the dark bleakness of the moonless night, leaning against the wooden frame of the doorway for support. Her hands would shake. Skin transparent and pale like tissue paper. Dark eyes.  
  
He'd memorized her. She'd been tattooed against the back of his eyelids, memory absorbed into the skin of his palms.   
  
Her skin. Her breath irregular and coming in short gasps against his neck.  
  
"A note? That's it?"  
  
He didn't answer. Her voice was wavering; stumbling in between anger, disappointment, and the kind of staining sadness that erases the brightness from one's eyes.  
  
Harry closed his eyes against the sting of keeping them open too long. He almost had to remind himself to do anything and everything now. Forgot to eat, forgot to breathe, forgot to sleep.  
  
His fingers brushing against burgundy lace. Chestnut-colored hair woven around his hands. Pink lips against his. "You'd follow," he said, finally, his eyes still closed.  
  
He could hear her breathing: shallow and quick. He knew she was crying.  
  
He remembered her face when she peered into her best friend's coffin. The way her hands shook. The way she turned from his family: they looked too much like him to bear.   
  
They'd kissed for the first time in the lobby that day. She'd tasted like sadness.   
  
Like heartbreak.  
  
"You can't go alone, Harry…" It wasn't strong. Her voice broke on his name.  
  
He swallowed hard.  
  
"It's my destiny."  
  
He finally turned to look at her. She was shaking from head to foot.  
  
He brushed his lips against hers; Hermione's hands were tangled up in the material of his shirt, trying to anchor him.  
  
She smelled like paper and salt. Cinnamon and breakdown.  
  
"Always," Harry brushed his lips against her pulse and untangled her hands.  
  
He heard the note flutter from her hand and Hermione slide to the ground as he walked from her.  
  
"Don't leave me…"  
  
His hands were so tight on the suitcase his fingernails were cutting into his palms. Harry closed the door behind him and stepped into the empty night. 


	2. Letters

__

"You're not supposed to be in here." 

Harry's hands trembled as he smoothed out the parchment, crisp from days spent absorbing raindrops in the unprotected pockets of his coat. 

He missed her. 

__

"I know." She bit her lip, pulling her dressing gown shut more tightly as she drew the curtains of his four poster around them, clothing them in burgundy-tinted darkness. "I couldn't sleep."

He wondered how many times he'd sat down to write to her. How many times he'd done an erasure spell, watching his words curl away into nothing as though they'd been scorched. 

He always said too much or too little. 

__

She never could sleep anymore. 

Not now. Not when the air burned overhead every night. Sickly green above Hogwarts. 

Not when everything around them was fading away, pulling in at the edges like something ill had crawled inside and there was nothing to do but wait it out.

Her nightgown dipped low enough to make his mouth run dry.

"Can I kiss you?" 

She could never know where he was.   


__

"Yes," her reply was breathless, a little shaky. They'd kissed before.

But it had been different. Funerals and flowers. Stained glass and salt. 

He pulled his knees to his chest. The cold seemed more prominent now: it had crawled into Harry's cells, melded itself into the air he breathed. 

Cold was everywhere.

__

Burgundy darkness played on her skin as Harry brushed his lips against hers.

The quill sounded too loud in the odd silence.

"I miss you."

The words looked bleak on the parchment.

He always said too much or too little.


	3. Rubies

Harry closed his eyes, his fists clenched together so tightly his knuckles went white. The building seemed to loom over him, omniscient with secrets and lies and everything that had kept him awake when the city lights faded. 

__

Harry heard the Gryffindor sword drop from his grasp, clattering noisily to the ground. Hermione was shaking visibly, her skin gone parchment white, bleak and drained of all colour. 

He'd never seen her eyes so wide yet so unseeing as she knelt beside the body at her feet. Everything was cold, stone and skin that felt like ice. 

"No, no, no, no, no…" He heard her whisper, and it snapped Harry out of his daze. She looked crazed, almost, hands flying to Ron's pulse points, shaking him. It was like she was trying to force life back into his still-open eyes.

Harry clenched his jaw down hard, waking him from his memories as he felt his teeth gritting against one another like stones. Bone on bone. 

__

He fell to his knees, pain blossoming on his kneecaps as they came crushing upon the damp floor of the dungeons. He felt bile rise in his throat as his system shut down. Harry closed into himself, hugging his knees to his chest, not blinking. Not this, not now. 

Not Ron. 

Harry kicked the iron of the gate just to think of something other than that night. Hermione's face, her curtain of hair bent over his best friend. The sounds of Death Eaters running through the hallways. 

__

She backed away from his body and against Harry, collapsing into him, her hands tangling up into his shirt, tears running down her face.

Harry walked up onto the steps of the Ministry, ready to accept whatever they wanted to tell him. It's not like he could deny his fate, after all, and with the world seemingly collapsing… 

__

The ruby of the Gryffindor sword caught what seemed to be the only light filtering into the dark room. Blood red rays played across Hermione's face, and Harry buried his face into her hair, finally letting the tears come.


	4. Bones

Harry hadn't opened the curtains since they had arrived in Lupin's apartment.

It seemed as though he had finally collapsed into himself, as she watched him lie there in bed, on top of the comforter, staring at the glow that sun produced through the curtains.

He didn't cry. He didn't move. Didn't say anything. Simply laid there, staring, all flat, dull green eyes and wrinkled jumper that Mrs. Weasley made him. He was so still sometimes Hermione had to watch the slight movement of his collar slowly pulling away from his throat to make sure he was still breathing.

Grief seemed to curl itself around him like a second skin, some sort of perfect-fitting clothing that wrapped around Harry, changing him completely. It flattened his eyes, whitened his skin. Shrunk him, somehow, so his stomach was concaved beneath his too-big clothes, his ribs and hips and collarbone jutting out so sharply Hermione bit her lip in worry. It seemed to seep into Harry himself, into his skin and his hair and his atmosphere, clinging to the air he breathed. It was the last straw, all that Harry could take before his mind and his body and everything he'd worked so hard to keep from crumbling finally shut down.

"Harry," Hermione whispered, padding across the rug of the office Lupin had turned into a makeshift guest room that housed the both of them while the Ministry and Dumbledore were trying to sort things out.

She saw him move, only slightly. He shifted so he was further away from her, turning his head so his hair blocked the view she had of his face.

"You need to eat."

She wondered when she'd become the stronger one in all of this; when exactly that transformation had occurred.

"I'm not hungry," he whispered, his voice hoarse and nearly inaudible.

"You must be, Harry," she saw him wince when she said his name, and turn further from her, onto his side. She could see the knobs of his spine trough his worn jumper, the wings of his shoulder blades.

"It should have been me, you know. It was supposed to be. He shouldn't have even been involved." It came out of nowhere, and Hermione's stomach retched at the blatancy of it, his coming out and finally admitting that Ron was gone. Forever. Hermione had come to subconsciously accept that Ron was gone for only a little while, that he was safe somewhere. Not that he had been murdered by Death Eaters.

A vision of his cold, blank stare made Hermione collapse onto the bed beside Harry. She was shaking at the memory of it all, while Harry stayed perfectly still. Frozen.

"Can you see me getting old, Hermione?" His voice was so soft Hermione had to strain to hear it, but it had a kind of childlike innocence and fright in it that made the tears in her eyes spill over.

"Harry…" she warned, her voice shaking as much as her hands. She didn't want to think about it, any of it. She'd spent the past few days busying herself over worrying about Harry. She couldn't come to terms with what exactly had happened. She couldn't. Hermione knew she couldn't.

"He was supposed to, and you know it. He was supposed to have kids and work somewhere in the Ministry and get gray hair and play chess everyday. He was. I'm not. I'll never get old, I'm not supposed to."

"Harry…" Hermione whispered, shaking her head. She knew she was supposed to comfort him, to tell him he was wrong and that she'd had dreams of them being old together. But she just sat there, on his bed, with tears running into the collar of her unwashed blouse. Her senses were both acute and blurred: contradictory. She could hear his breathing and see all of the dust motes highlighted by the yellow glow from the curtains, yet she couldn't feel anything, like the whole of her was completely numb.

"It was supposed to be me. You think so, his family thinks so, Lupin, Dumbledore. I see it when they look at me," Harry finally turned to look at her, and Hermione was surprised to see that there were no tears on his face, just a blank, worried sort of expression that made Hermione ache.

"Stop," she said, with more force than she'd meant to, and finally laid down, facing him so the length of their bodies were pressed together, their noses almost touching, "He… It wasn't right, there's no denying it. But that doesn't mean that it was your fault. You're right, he was supposed to be old. He wasn't done with life, or growing up, or living. Ron wasn't done, because he was still young and still had so much to…" Hermione broke off, avoiding Harry's eyes. She didn't now where she was going, words spilling out of her mouth like tears. "Ron wasn't done, but he chose to go fight. And that changes everything. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anyone's fault. It was a choice, and that's what makes it different. It was Ron's choice."

She moved closer to him, wrapping her arms around his slight frame, feeling him breathe. She felt him swallow, inhaling sharp, hesitant breaths. There was a brightness in his eyes that told her that he didn't believe her, that he was still going to carry around the burden of his best friend's death like he carried everything else.

He wasn't young like Ron had been, or Hermione still hoped she was. He never had been. His life had been shadowed by all things evil, and Harry was the only person that seemed to be able to fight them off. He'd been burdened with heroism, and Hermione finally realized she'd never be able to shield him from that like she had been since she'd first noticed the dark flases his eyes often had back in first year. Her Harry was destined to be Harry Potter, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Harry bent his head to bury it in the crook of her shoulder, and she felt him relax against her. She curled herself around him, tightening her grip as if just to feel him, to wake up her nerves. To feel anything.

"It wasn't your fault," she whispered again, but he was asleep for the first time in days.


End file.
